Laughing Together

I love it when everyone in the movie theater laughs together. Love the resonance of a hundred voices shimmering in a hundred chests. The movie isn’t even that funny. The same lines delivered on the small screen would barely earn a lip curl. But shoulder-to-shoulder in the dark, a spirit whose name we’ve forgotten rises to the surface. One person gets the joke first and becomes the laughter epicenter, the patient zero in the guffawing fever spreading through every lung the place has got. All day, we failed each other. Missing our turn to merge into traffic. Letting the meeting drone on into the lunch hour. But now we’re jiggling in unison, swept up in the same ocean current. The beam flickers above our heads like in that movie with the lighthouse. You know the one, with John Malkovich or maybe Willem Dafoe. Where the ship crashes into the rocks and the giant octopus slinks in through a hole in the hull. But you almost never see its whole body, just the tentacles reaching through the darkness. It was creepy but also funny—pulling feelings out of you that were way past major and minor. Maybe it wasn’t Malkovich. Damn. Maybe this was two movies. Sorry, I might be making this up.

someone has to tell the bees

When the queen dies, someone has to tell the bees. The keeper ties black cloth to the gate of their habitat and whispers the news into the quivering mass humming in the dark. Same goes for the corgis and the royal ravens. When my mother’s eyes close and her hand stops squeezing mine, there won’t be any animals around. I’ve heard that dogs can sense it, and that for a few days the cat might spend more time on your lap. But all mom has are plants. Will they seem brighter? Seem to reach a little higher? If I were king, I’d have someone tell the plants. I’d have them play OK Computer in the Alnwick poison garden and speak into the blooming faces of the nightshade, thanking it for all the pupils it’s dilated—all those beautified Venetian eyes. I’d have them whisper into the open bells of the angel's trumpet and the laurel, whose cyanide used to kill trophy butterflies. Have them dig up the devil-limbed mandrake, hush his screams as they drag him into the light, then touch a blade to both of his knobby shoulders and assure him that his service has been truly exemplary.